It’s good to be excited and passionate about a potentially impactful way to help. Apologies if the following sounds harsh—but I want to strongly argue against the premise of this post. From my perspective, you shouldn’t recommend, let alone pursue, the unilateral deployment of large-scale actions with currently unclear consequences across tens of sovereign nations. Gene drives are powerful technology and implementing them properly requires further technical and political work. Naive attempts at gene drives could cause both ecological and diplomatic damage, perhaps making future use of gene drives less tractable. As one example, you haven’t at all mentioned the need for a designed reversal drive, a fundamental safety mechanism.
James Tibenderana’s recent 80K interview talks about this (38 min in), which might be helpful.
I think rather than trying to rush into unilateral deployment, your best approach would be to either: 1) research and write-up an analysis in much greater depth on what the potential/bottlenecks/barriers are, and what funders/talent/a new org could do in the space; or 2) contact the major researchers/organisations in the space and volunteer/talk/work to understand the space and what’s needed
It’s good to be excited and passionate about a potentially impactful way to help. Apologies if the following sounds harsh—but I want to strongly argue against the premise of this post. From my perspective, you shouldn’t recommend, let alone pursue, the unilateral deployment of large-scale actions with currently unclear consequences across tens of sovereign nations. Gene drives are powerful technology and implementing them properly requires further technical and political work. Naive attempts at gene drives could cause both ecological and diplomatic damage, perhaps making future use of gene drives less tractable. As one example, you haven’t at all mentioned the need for a designed reversal drive, a fundamental safety mechanism.
James Tibenderana’s recent 80K interview talks about this (38 min in), which might be helpful.
I think rather than trying to rush into unilateral deployment, your best approach would be to either:
1) research and write-up an analysis in much greater depth on what the potential/bottlenecks/barriers are, and what funders/talent/a new org could do in the space; or
2) contact the major researchers/organisations in the space and volunteer/talk/work to understand the space and what’s needed